What are the customs of Dahan?

Dahan is the last of the twenty-four solar terms, and it is celebrated on January 20-21 every year when the sun reaches 300 degrees of the yellow meridian. So, what are the customs of Dahan? What is the symbolism of eating rice cake in the big cold? For this question, many partners are very interested in knowing the answer, the following quickly to understand it.

What are the customs of the Dahan festival?

Steaming glutinous rice

Lingnan folk proverb has a saying: small cold, big cold, no wind from the cold. On the extremely cold day of the traditional festival, Guangdong folk developed the custom of eating glutinous rice. Nowadays, in Guangdong, it is a common scene: before the arrival of the big cold, every family cooks a pot of fragrant glutinous rice, mixed with preserved meat, shrimp, dried squid, mushrooms and so on, in order to welcome the coldest day of the traditional festival. Glutinous rice is sweet in flavor and warm in nature, so it has a nourishing effect on the cold. In Anqing, Anhui province, there is a custom of deep-frying spring rolls for the coldest day of the year.

Rolling lard slag

Rolling lard slag is a winter game for children to keep warm. A collection of more than ten children, evenly divided into two groups, sitting back to back with each other, hard to support the rolling. To be able to force each other back for the win. This game is usually done on a bench or a large threshold. Children after the game, sweat without feeling the cold.

Dahan to welcome the year

After the Dahan, another year, the Dahan festival often coincides with the end of the year. Dahan itself has a strong flavor of the New Year, therefore, such a festival, in addition to the season to do agricultural work, people began to busy resignation of the old and welcome the New Year, sweeping dust and clean things, to prepare for a rich variety of new year's goods for the New Year running around to catch up with the New Year's fair, buy New Year's goods, write spring couplets, to prepare a variety of sacrificial offerings, sweeping dust and clean things, to get rid of the old, prepare for the New Year's goods, curing all kinds of preserved sausage, bacon, or frying and cooking of various kinds of chicken, duck, fish, meat and other yearly dishes.

The symbolism of eating rice cakes in Beijing

In Beijing, eating rice cakes is also called eating cold cake, cold cake is a kind of rice cake, not only because of its glutinous rice than rice sugar content is high, the whole body feels warm after eating, there is a warm dispersal of wind and cold, moistening the lungs and spleen and stomach, and the people chose to eat rice cakes on the day of the Great Cold, and there is the meaning of the year high with good luck and good fortune, the peace of the year and step by step, the good fortune of rising. So the old Beijing custom of the day of the big cold, the family ate rice cakes, both with auspicious flavor, but also can dispel the body cold, so it is called the elimination of cold cakes.